Vasant Kaiwar

Lecturing Fellow

Overview

My research and scholarship focuses on the period from the late-eighteenth century to the present, a period marked by revolutions and counterrevolutions, imperialism, nationalism and decolonization, the intensification of processes of globalization, and the ideologies and categories of knowledge production associated with those developments. In terms of historical-geographic focus my research is interested in analyzing three historical junctures in which ‘India’ as an object of study and generation of counter-systemic knowledge has played a vital part. The three junctures are respectively: the early-nineteenth century (the origination and elaboration of the ‘Oriental Renaissance’); the period from about 1914 to 1942 (nationalist ideology and praxis, particularly the Gandhian version and its returns); and the period from about the early 1980s to the present (postcolonial historiography and theory). In all three junctures, a profound dislocation, impending or actual sense of loss accompanied efforts to contain the fallout of what many saw, and see, as changes that would endanger the foundations of their world. Those real-world contexts fuelled a process of knowledge production that brought together a range of old and new disciplines in innovative combinations and enabled original interventions in crucial debates.

My book, The Postcolonial Orient: The Politics of Difference and the Project of Provincializing Europe is intended both as an intervention in the historiography of colonial and post-colonial India and a contribution to a critique of postcolonial theory. In doing so, the book tries to show the affinities of the Romantic Orientalism of the late-eighteenth and early nineteenth century, Subaltern Studies from its inception, and postcolonial theory as a form of expatriate intellectual production in the metropolitan academy. Within these broad coordinates of time and space, this work takes up issues of capital, modernity and postmodernity and the salience of this kind of periodization for understanding a history of the present.